Vidya Balan: “Ghanchakkar gave me a legitimate reason to be mad on screen” Exclusive Interview

Coming up on Friday we get to see the great Vidya Balan take on another avatar and this one is quite kooky! Yes, Vidya is testing her comedy chops and playing funny in the upcoming Raj Kumar Gupta directed Ghanchakkar, which also stars Emraan Hashmi. The actress plays Neetu Athray aka Mrs. Ghanchakkar who is described as a lady with a sweet demeanor with a firebrand Punjaban trapped inside. Neetu is not into comfy clothes – she is into fashion atrocities. She never thinks enough is ever enough, she believes life should be lived young when one IS young and everything from the TV to the apartment to family holidays should be king-size.

We got a very quick and way to short 6 minutes with the actress and she gave us an inside look at playing Neetu! Check it out!

Describing the film Vidya says, “Ghanchakkar is a thriller, of course, being Raj Kumar’s favorite genre, and he combined a thriller with comedy, so it’s a comic thriller and it’s the first of its kind in the country.”

One of the main reasons she decided to do a comedy was that it was going to be directed by Raj Kumar Gupta, “You know when we were doing No One Killed Jessica I had a sense that whenever Rajkumar Gupta would do a comedy it would be very special and a unique one, because there’s a scene in NOKJ when Sabrina, my character, starts laughing in court, when the trial for her sister’s murder is on and it was a very, very real situation. In that, I realized that he manages to find the drama in the regular or real situations in life and similarly he finds humor in real situations. So I knew his comedy would be special.”

“The fact that this was going to be my first comedy and that it would be with Raj Kumar as my director, who I trust implicitly – it made sense for to do it,” she adds.

Vidya revealed that actually she had to play Neetu, “I think I had little choice in doing this film (Laughs). So after Raj Kumar came to me with the script, I actually asked him, ‘Why do you want me to play her? You know there is little for me to do.’ And he said, ‘No, you have to bring her alive and I am not going to make this one without you’. So I said, ‘Don’t emotionally blackmail mail me just because we’ve done a film together’ (Laughs). And he said, ‘No, but I really think that you will be able to bring alive that madness like no one else’. And I said, ‘Oh wow! Thank you so much!’ But it was actually giving me a legitimate reason to be mad on screen. So I went ahead and did it (Laughs).”

She says it was the script and the character that really drew her to the role, “I thought this character was hilarious. She is just so over the top, she is so out there, she is loud, she is vibrant, she is vivacious. She’s loud and she doesn’t even know it. Her tastes are loud. She’s just very amusing and yet she is very identifiable. I’ve seen people like her around me; people who are extremely self-assured and who really think the world of themselves. I love such people.”

Adding, “I had to work little bit on the Punjabi accent because she is a middle class Punjabi housewife and a hatti-katti one at that. You know what hatti-katti means, a wholesome full-bodied Punjabi woman (Laughs). So I actually gained weight for The Dirty Picture about 12 kilograms and I did Ghanchakkar immediately after that and Rajkumar actually told me I want you to retain the weight, don’t want you loose it because she is a full bodied wholesome Punjabi woman. She is middle-class and she is very, very real.”

About playing the character she says, “It was GREAT fun Stacey. I’ve let my hair down. I hope it is as much fun when people watch her and watch the film. But really it has been a breathe of fresh air for me. It was a less dramatic role and I could get away with anything especially with clothes and mannerisms with this character.”

Speaking of those clothes, “They are outlandish (Laughs), they are bizarre and they are her concept of: “How do you like the idea of having red lips all over your top to denote sexy” (Laughs). She is a housewife and she lives her life within those 4 walls and what makes it interesting for her while doing these things is designing her own clothes. She is the kind of woman who goes into a mall and tells herself ‘Oh my God this is so overly priced. I am going to get the same thing done by my tailor’. But obviously it will never be the same. She takes matching to another level. She believes that she’s being modern by combining different things that she sees in fashion magazines and oh my god what have you. There’s just one of her in the world! (Laughs).”

So what does Vidya love about the film? “The fact that you are laughing even as you get embroiled in this mix and you don’t know how messy laughter can be.” (Laughs).

Sadly with that our time ran out and she was off but as you can see it was a fun and funny six minutes!

You can check out Vidya’s crazy, mad Neetu, when Ghanchakkar hits theaters on June 28th!